ephs wrote:after the idea came to my mind, i researched about crossfits in germany, members of the gym, where i train, the population in the region etc. and i made a financial plan how much money i should have in the beginning and how much members i need to pay the rent for the facility, to pay the credit and to get enough for myself per month. this calculation was very positive, so i openend this thread here to get some infos on gym openings and your opinion on crossfit.

Sounds good. I guess then all I can say is let us know when you're open. I may be travelling to the Netherlends once or twice/year in the coming years, and Germany is a hop-skip-jump away, I'll drop by and bend some bars :)

That said, the marketing they do over here in the US is fantastic. I can see where it might be beneficial to have the name of a recognized brand on your business. It's just like buying a McDonalds or other franchise (they call themselves affiliates and I think the legalities are different).

As far as business plans go, they'll probably want you to charge more than 50euro. It might be different in Germany, but the ones here charge $150 - 300 per month. This isn't a typical, membership based business model. It's a training focused model that is similar to mine. We don't sell memberships, just coaching.

Crossfit is just the latest exercise fad -- it will soon go the way of Tae Bo and Jazzercise. If you jump in soon enough, you may be able to ride the tide for a while, but eventually you'll need to adapt to the market change. (Maybe you, personally, can come up with the fad.) Just don't get trapped by limiting yourself to Crossfit.

Travis wrote:Crossfit is just the latest exercise fad -- it will soon go the way of Tae Bo and Jazzercise. If you jump in soon enough, you may be able to ride the tide for a while, but eventually you'll need to adapt to the market change. (Maybe you, personally, can come up with the fad.) Just don't get trapped by limiting yourself to Crossfit.

there isn't a Tae Bo or Jazzercise games with a $50,000 prize for first place.

Travis wrote:Crossfit is just the latest exercise fad -- it will soon go the way of Tae Bo and Jazzercise. If you jump in soon enough, you may be able to ride the tide for a while, but eventually you'll need to adapt to the market change. (Maybe you, personally, can come up with the fad.) Just don't get trapped by limiting yourself to Crossfit.

there isn't a Tae Bo or Jazzercise games with a $50,000 prize for first place.

By the way, Joe DeFranco started out with NO GYM, and only the equipment he could carry in the back of his old SUV. He would go to clients' homes. Later had worked from a small rented room for a time before renting his first warehouse space.

Peter trained there for several years, and had a great experience.

Our greatest fear should not be of failure, but of succeeding at things in life that don't really matter.--Francis Chan

There's a nice looking, functionally well equipped niche 'holistic lifestyle health and fitness' training box, juice bar and cafe at one of the bus interchanges I transit through.
It looks like a CF facility, but there's a lot more "21st century unicorn hugging tofu liver cleansing" behind their philosophy than just looking would show.
The lovely couple who own it built it up over several years from their personal training business which they ran out of their apartment. Which was literally a one bedroom unit half way up a tower.
They produced several years of training and recipe videos from their k-word/training area. I know it was half way up a tower as in these videos you could see the view from their balcony.
From memory they had a cable machine, rack of dumbells and squat rack/chin setup in the living room. No furniture. No TV. And fermented macrobiotic curd type things in their fridge, which was four metres away from the cable machine.
And now several years later they have awsome trainees and a great business that's in line with their world view and interests. In this case slow and steady has worked really well.

yeah, there are many ways and concepts to build a gym or business in the fitness sector. this defranco style also sounds good.

i'm not stuck to crossfit. i only want the opposite of a commercial gym. i want a warehouse with the basics in it: barbells, racks, chin up bars + kettlebells and dumbbels. with that tools many concepts are possible, you could even train like a boxer with it. but another option is to focus a bit on soccer, cause most clubs don't have their own gyms, so anybody who is not in the best 3 leagues doesn't have the chance to workout in his club. maybe the best would really be to make the crossfit license and a license for olympic weightlifting and then try a name with "cross" in it, so that attends some people who know the hype and the gym name won't go down if crossfit goes down one time. but crossfit has survived many years.

Jungledoc wrote:Peter trained there for several years, and had a great experience.

Yes, I did. I'm happy to answer questions about it.

Also, halfbreed has a gym now? I see I missed a lot in my lax posting/reading days.

He was talking about buying a 10,000 ft warehouse and converting it to a gym. He stopped posting while we were discussing it, so I don't know how he made out.

Stu Ward
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Let thy food be thy medicine, and thy medicine be thy food.~Hippocrates
Strength is the adaptation that leads to all other adaptations that you really care about - Charles Staley
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Thanks TimD